Adam's Senior Photos

Formal headshot from our makeshift,
improvised living room studio... he looks like
he should be working at NASA here!

This is the time of year when the families of every high school senior are scrambling to get some photos of their senior for the school yearbook. Even though I seem to have a camera affixed to my hand at all times, we also have found ourselves scrambling to put together some photos to submit for Adam's yearbook.

Although I needed to shoot a couple of headshots of Adam, it turns out that our most difficult task was choosing which of the many candid photos I have on hand to send in for submission to the yearbook!

Adam has always done a good job at avoiding me whenever I have the camera in hand, however, I have done a better job at still managing to get good photos of him regardless. Of course, long telephoto lenses help me with being stealthy and staying under Adam's radar. That being said, I actually found more than two dozen good photos of Adam that could be submitted for use in his yearbook.

That sounds great to have so many photos to choose from but the school requires "no more than three photos"! This includes one formal 'headshot' and two candids. It was time to narrow down the choices... I know... this is a great "problem" to have... too many photos to choose from for an important project with a very short deadline.

A second formal headshot from our
makeshift, improvised living room studio...

First, we also needed one or two formal headshots. This would have been very nice to do outdoors with colorful foliage in the background, but autumn in Vermont is long behind us. The trees are bare, the ground is brown, and the mountaintops are covered with new snow. The light outside is stark and cold this time of year (referring to the color of the light) so we would need to set up a little photography studio in our tiny living room and kitchen so we could control the light.

I think we ended up with two really nice choices for headshots. Considering the fact that I have a serious lack of studio equipment and absolutely no room in the house for this type of activity, these photos came out fairly well.

Every time I attempt something like this, I swear I will buy some studio monolights with constant modeling lights. Trying to focus in the dark while just using two flash guns is difficult at best. Then, trying to get the shot before the flashguns shutdown automatically is exceptionally frustrating. Flashguns shutdown after a couple of minutes of inactivity to save the batteries. That is a great feature for saving battery power but terrible for trying to work in a darkened, improvised studio! Maybe someday I will break down and buy a few good monolights. That purchase will definitely make studio work much, much easier.

A fairly recent shot of Adam being
awarded a medal and citation for
Northeast Region's Cadet of the Year...

The room was intentionally dark so that I didn't have a problem with color-casts due to different types of lighting. That fixed the color-cast problem but made focusing a nightmare. Because of the very low light (read none), I knew my auto-focus lenses would not work well so I opted for a manual focus lens. Well, that requires exceptional eyesight. Needless to say, I don't have that either! Somehow I got lucky and managed to get a couple of usable photos though...

These few photos are just for Adam's yearbook. Closer to the end of the school year before Adam graduates and Spring has sprung, we hope to get a bunch more photos for a 'senior package' just for Sheila... the standard "Mom Package" for graduating seniors.

The one great thing about these two studio shots (above) is that I managed to get Adam to relax and smile nicely without looking like he was forced to smile at gunpoint.

Finding candid photos of Adam is easy since I always seem to be carrying a camera...

The bigger problem would be finding photos of the photographer... thankfully, we don't need to do that...

After this experience, Adam claims he never wants to be a model!